Back to the typewriter again

I've let myself wallow in quite a dry spell the past few months. I guess I just had so many other projects I wanted to work on in my very limited free time and I sent writing back to the end of the line over and over again. It's time to push through that. Spring is here and a new year of writing begins now.

Submissions have opened again for The Fairy Tale Review. This one will be The Yellow Issue and is to be guest-edited by Lily Hoang! If you haven't read any of her work, do it now. The Evolutionary Revolution (from Les Figues Press) knocked the wind out of me. She also has a book published by Fairy Tale Review Press called Changing, which is on my nightstand now. I'll probably crack that open after I've finished The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold, by Kate Bernheimer (the last in the Gold sisters' trilogy).

As a very minor side note which is completely off the point,  the wildflowers (or, to some of you, weeds) in the picture above are called hairy bittercress. Isn't that a fabulous name? In the last year or so, I've become fascinated by the colloquial names of wildflowers and weeds. They really are much more interesting than the names given our standard cultivated botanicals. I've been looking up the names of all the ones I was surrounded with growing up in the woods and I am in love with them all over again: lady's thumb, mayapple, jack-in-the-pulpit, may weed, scarlet pimpernel, Queen Anne's lace, scutch, pokeweed, common groundsel, henbit deadnettle, dayflower. When I first met them, they did not have names; and now that I know them, they are even more mysterious and wonderful. They had these secret identities all along.